Through the 1930s, the best-known flute player in jazz was Wayman Carver, who played with the popular Benny Carter and Chick Webb bands, but like most jazz flutists for decades to come, he was mainly a sax player who added some flute now and then as a treat. The earliest known jazz flute solo on record was by Cuban musician Alberto Socarras, on 1927’s “ Shootin’ the Pistol” by the Clarence Williams band, but you have to strain to hear it, demonstrating the problem. In an orchestra that includes a whole woodwind section, the massed power of many flute players can make itself heard, but in the smaller ensembles and soloist-emphasizing arrangements typical of most jazz, a flute just couldn’t cut through the louder instruments.
In fact, despite being such an old instrument, it was a latecomer to 20 th-century pop music, both live and recorded, because its delicacy of sound worked against it. The flute’s fate in pop tends to fluctuate that way, through phases of ubiquity and then long fallow periods.
